Many employers subsidize, in some manner, their employees' car travel. For example, some employers directly pay for or reimburse their employees for rental vehicles that are rented for business purposes (e.g., traveling to meetings, etc.). As another example, many employers also reimburse their employees for mileage with respect to employees' use of their personal vehicles for business purposes (with such mileage reimbursement also reimbursing for fuel expenses). A prior art tool that permits a user to compare expected monetary costs as between travel by rental vehicle and travel by reimbursable personal vehicle has been available through the website of Enterprise. This tool is known as the “Rental vs Employee Reimbursement Calculator”, as shown in FIGS. 10A and 10B. FIG. 10A is a graphical user interface (GUI) that shows user entry fields for data that the user must supply to the calculator to compare expected rental and reimbursement costs. Namely, the user needs to manually enter all of the following: (1) a distance for the trip (d), (2) the total number of days in the trip (t), (3) a daily rate for a rental vehicle (r1), (4) a cost for fuel (c), (5) a reimbursement rate (in units of dollars per mile) (r2), and (6) a fuel usage for a rental car (in units of miles per gallon) (f). After the user enters values in these data entry fields and selects the “Calculate Results” button, the GUI of FIG. 10B is displayed. FIG. 10B shows the same data entry fields as present in FIG. 10A (including the values entered by the user) and also includes a read-only output section that displays (1) text that identifies whether the rental vehicle or reimbursable personal vehicle has a lower cost, and (2) a comparison table that displays the expected costs for a rental vehicle and a reimbursable personal vehicle. The formulas used by the calculator for these cost calculations are as follows
      RPVC    =          d      *              r        2                  RVC    =                  (                  t          *                      r            1                          )            +              (                              c            *            f                    d                )            wherein RPVC represents the expected cost for the reimbursable personal vehicle and wherein RVC represents the expected cost for the rental vehicle.
Furthermore, some employers also maintain a fleet of vehicles for use in a “pool” by their employees on an as needed basis (once again, for business purposes). Employer vehicle fleets may comprise employer-owned vehicles, leased vehicles, rental vehicles, or any combination thereof.
The inventors believe that a systemic and automated technique through which employers can control how their employees make use of available travel options would be a useful tool for helping employers achieve desired goals, such as controlling costs and/or reducing carbon emissions. Toward this end, the inventors disclose several embodiments of the present invention.
Thus, according to exemplary embodiments of the invention, the inventors disclose systems, methods and computer program products for managing vehicle travel. An exemplary system comprises a processor configured execute a travel management software application, the travel management software application configured to (1) receive data from a user that represents a plan to travel by vehicle, (2) determine a distance for the vehicle travel plan based at least in part on the received vehicle travel plan data, (3) retrieve vehicle travel mode data for a plurality of vehicle travel modes based at least in part on the received vehicle travel plan data, (4) process the received vehicle travel plan data based at least in part on (i) the determined distance and (ii) the retrieved vehicle travel mode data, and (5) based on the processing, select a vehicle travel mode that satisfies the vehicle travel plan and a vehicle travel mode selection rule from among a plurality of vehicle travel modes, wherein the vehicle travel modes comprise at least two members of the group consisting of a rental vehicle travel mode, a fleet vehicle travel mode and a reimbursable personal vehicle travel mode.
As used herein, the term “vehicle” refers to a road-based vehicle such as a car or truck. The term “vehicle” does not encompass modes of transportation by air or water, such as airplanes or boats. However, it should be understood that this does not mean that the travel plans encompassed by embodiments of the invention cannot include air travel or water travel as a component thereof. For example, a user's travel plan may comprise multiple legs, with a first leg being from the office to the airport, a second leg being by air from City A to City B, and a third leg from City B's airport to a meeting location. Embodiments disclosed herein can be configured to select vehicle travel options for the first and third legs based on predetermined rules as discussed below.
As used herein, the term “vehicle travel mode” refers to a manner of vehicle travel subject to a particular type of employer subsidization. Examples of vehicle travel modes include rental vehicles (wherein the employer pays for all (or a part) of the rental vehicle costs), fleet vehicles (wherein the employer pays to maintain a fleet of vehicles that are available for use by employees) and reimbursable personal vehicles (which are employees' personal vehicles for which the employer will reimburse an employee for some types of business use). As noted above, employer fleet vehicles may comprise employer-owned vehicles, leased vehicles, rental vehicles, or any combination thereof depending on the employer's needs. For example, some employers own one or more vehicles and maintain those vehicles in a pool for employee use. Some employers lease vehicles for the same purpose. Further still, some employers contract for one or more rental vehicles from a rental vehicle service provider which are in turn provisioned to employees for business travel on an as needed basis. For purposes of clarity when referring to a rental vehicle travel mode and a fleet vehicle travel mode in situations where the employer's vehicle fleet includes one or more rental vehicles, it should be understood that the rental vehicle travel mode refers to a travel mode where the subject vehicle is a vehicle rented by the employer from a rental vehicle service provider such that the rental vehicle service provider takes control over the rental vehicle as the end of a given instance of use by an employee. By contrast the fleet vehicle travel mode in this situation refers to a travel mode where the subject vehicle is a vehicle provided by a rental vehicle service provider but for which the employer controls the vehicle between periods of use by employees. With a fleet vehicle such as this, the employer typically contracts with a rental vehicle service provider for the rental vehicle service provider to provide one or more vehicles from the rental vehicle service provider's rental fleet on a long term basis where those vehicles are kept on the employer's premises to be made available to employees. Thus, while the vehicles made available to employees can be thought of as a rental vehicle in the sense that a rental vehicle service provider has rented those vehicles to the employer on a long term basis, for the purposes of this disclosure such vehicles are better referred to as fleet vehicles. For example, such vehicles represent a certain amount of “sunk cost” for the employer in that the employer is paying the rental vehicle service provider some amount for those vehicles whether or not an employee actually uses the vehicle. By contrast, with the rental vehicle travel mode, there will not be a “sunk cost” component because costs for rental vehicles within the rental vehicle travel mode are borne on an “as needed” basis.
The vehicle travel mode selection rule can be any rule that selects a vehicle travel mode from among the plurality of vehicle travel modes based on or more predetermined criteria. For example, a vehicle travel mode selection rule can be a “lowest monetary cost” rule that operates to select the vehicle travel mode having the lowest associated monetary cost. With such a rule, the data processing performed by the travel management software application would include computing the expected costs for the plurality of vehicle travel modes taking into consideration the received travel plan data. As another example, the vehicle travel mode selection rule can be a “lowest carbon emissions” rule that operates to select the vehicle travel mode having the lowest associated carbon emissions. With this rule, the data processing performed by the travel management software application would include computing the expected carbon emissions for the plurality of vehicle travel modes taking into consideration the received travel plan data. It should be noted that the vehicle travel mode selection rule could also combine cost concerns with environmental concerns by using a combination of expected costs and carbon emissions as criteria for controlling the selection process. For example, weights can be assigned to cost factors and environmental factors associated with vehicle travel mode options to arrive at a desired balance of cost and environmental considerations when selecting an appropriate vehicle travel mode.
The inventors further note their belief that a large proportion of vehicle travel involves a single person driving with no passengers, despite the fact that most vehicles accommodate 4 passengers or more. Moreover, many people traveling at any given time may share a similar, or even identical, origin and destination, particularly in corporate environments where many employees often have a need to travel to different worksites and common client/customer offices. However, the inventors believe that the frequency of ride-sharing is much lower than it could be due to a lack of any efficient mechanism to identify and alert drivers to ridesharing opportunities. Toward this end, the inventors disclose exemplary embodiments wherein the travel management software application also tracks multiple users' vehicle travel plans to identify potential ridesharing opportunities.
In additional exemplary embodiments, the system can also be configured to manage pick-up and delivery of packages by users of the system. For example, an employee may be asked (or required) to deliver a package from one corporate office to another.
Further still, in exemplary embodiments, the system can track past vehicle usage and travel plans for use in generating data indicative of various measures of system effectiveness (e.g., cost savings over time, carbon emissions savings over time, etc.). Reports on this and other data can be generated to assess the value the system provides to an employer.
These and other features of exemplary embodiments of the invention will be in part apparent and in part pointed out to those of ordinary skill in the art upon a review of the teachings herein. The below-described preferred embodiments are meant to be illustrative of the invention and not limiting.